HHS to spend $20 million on PR to promote ObamaCare

Ed MorrisseyPosted at 2:41 pm on May 22, 2012

You know what ObamaCare really needs? No, not a Constitutional loophole, or a subservient Supreme Court. It needs a public-relations campaign to convince the majorty of Americans who want it repealed that they actually loveBig Brother government control of their health care. And guess what? We all get to pay for it:

The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act.

The new, multimedia ad campaign is designed to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses, an HHS official said.

The campaign was mandated by the Affordable Care Act and must describe the importance of prevention while also explaining preventive benefits provided by the healthcare law. The law makes many preventive services available without a co-pay or deductible, and provides new preventive benefits to Medicare patients.

The contract went to Porter Novelli in what The Hill reports as “a competitive bidding process.” The result of this “competitive bidding process” just coincidentally dropped $20 million into the lap of … a former “on-air surrogate of the Obama for America campaign,” as Matt Lewis reports:

The story notes that the public relations firm Porter Novelli “won the contract after a competitive bidding process.” Interestingly, the managing director of Porter Novellis’ Washington D.C. office is Catherine “Kiki” McLean — a true “D.C. insider,” according to her bio.

Indeed she is. Among her other accomplishments, McLean’s bio also notes she was “an on-air surrogate for the Obama for America campaign.”

This comes on the heels of the revelation that another HHS contract, this one for almost $6 million, went to another Obama crony, Eric Whitaker, at the University of Chicago medical center at which Michelle Obama used to draw a six-figure salary. Whitaker also turned out to be the crony that allegedly tried to pay off Jeremiah Wright in 2008, according to Wright himself. Why, if these bids didn’t go through a “competitive bid process,” one might be tempted to look at them as payoffs, eh?

Matt asks just how competitive the bid process was that resulted in a $20 million payday to flack for ObamaCare:

This, of course, raises a few questions, including: Just how competitive was the competitive bid process that went to a senior Democrat?

And isn’t this the kind of insider access Obama decried in 2008?

Why yes, yes it is, as Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out just yesterday. Here is just one of four videos Andrew found from the 2008 campaign on this very subject:

ObamaCare looks more and more like a slush fund to repay Obama cronies. No wonder Obama is so desperate to save it.